Ready, Set, Action! Insights that Inspire, Provoke and Transform

Market research is ready for a makeover. It’s estimated that 80% of market research is focused on tactical, rear-view mirror research. Many so-called ‘insights’ are nothing more than compilations of facts and trends.

Insights are foundational to creating strategies for growth. Insights take businesses in new directions by making the world more understandable and predictable. Insights are not limited to primary research, they can come from customer data analysis, employee interviews, competitor observations, supplier feedback, and more. Whatever the data source, discerning game changing insights requires in-depth understanding of the values that drive customer choices.

Unilever’s mission for global market research is “inspiration, provocation and transformational actions.” We couldn’t agree more.

At Brand Amplitude, we use both traditional and new market research tools to uncover deep insights about customer decision-making, then partner with our clients to apply these insights to drive business growth. We believe the future belongs to those who can both recognize an insight and activate it throughout the organization. We emphasize internal activation to ensure that findings get to the people who can make the most use of them.

Inspirational Story: Danone

Last year, Danone completed “Healthy People”, an immersive study designed to understand how U.S. consumers define and practice healthy shopping and eating. The study yielded 14 key insights for the shopper insights team. They didn’t stop there. To encourage broader engagement with the findings across the company, Danone created an online ‘activation studio’ to facilitate interaction with the data by brand managers, product developers, and communications teams. Key insights were turned into memes such as #YOMOMENTS, #YOKITCHEN and #YOLITTLEONES. Employees were encouraged to explore, comment on, and share their ideas. In this way, insights became platforms for collaboration, and many new ideas were brought forward.

Brand Amplitude Activation in Action: Maple Leaf Farms

Maple Leaf Farms leads in providing duck to specialty grocers and restaurants. While duck is not exactly an everyday meal for most consumers, it is no longer considered all that exotic. To generate insights about how to convert duck ‘inclined’ shoppers to consumers who are comfortable buying duck regularly, we partnered with the Maple Leaf Farms marketing team to conduct an immersive study. In the final phase, consumers shopped for and prepared duck, and shared their experiences in an online community with other duck inclined consumers.

Ten key insights were identified and summarized in a series of memes, like #PrepareforAdventure, #InspireMe and #ThinkBeyondtheWholeBird. The memes became platforms for co-creating strategies in joint sessions with consumers, sales teams and retail customers. In the end, the sessions identified nine distinctive strategies for engaging consumers at the point of sale. Presto, insights became actions that inform how the company relates to consumers and customers in the store. For example, now instead of recipes, package and store signage focus on higher level inspirational cooking ideas. – 5 things to do with duck tonight!